skyscrapers have very complex lives
I’ve just read that the name of the sub-contracting company in charge of the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building is the John Galt Corporation. Who is John Galt? I immediately recognized the intriguing literary/political reference within the firm’s name, and, regardless of what we eventually learn about the ultimate responsibility for the death of two firemen this week, the connection is likely to continue the fictional character’s complex association with corporate greed and laissez-faire capitalism .
ADDENDA: I’ve turned up these few bits on the John Galt Corporation by searching Google and its cached links:
The firm is located at 3900 Webster Avenue in The Bronx [718-654-5300]; its principals are former executives of the Safeway Environmental Corp., a firm with its own history of problems; Galt’s work at the Deutsche Bank site was already causing injury and incurring fines before this week; and finally, World Trade Center-area neighbors had expressed serious concerns about the firm’s qualifications since early last year.
[image from wikipedia]
Category: NYC
summer afternoon – summer afternoon
view through our open French doors on a cool, cloudy August afternoon
frippery
untitled (fuzz) 2007
Now it’s just a website frippery, but this happy mix lining our courtyard-garden path makes me smile every time I walk through it.
two Greenpoint survivors
Its neighbor’s roses and its own arbor gate standing at the edge of the sidewalk are homey touches for this unreconstructed wooden Federal house on Green Street in Greenpoint. The house is built in exactly the same form as the typical urban row house but in fact, apart from late excrescences on either side, it’s actually free-standing. It’s probably a relic from the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
The almost-hidden eyebrow windows, the heavy flat moldings around the door and windows and the elegant porch columns express the period of this small Greek Revival house on Huron Street, one block south of the house shown above. I wonder however about the absence of a pediment, and the fluting on those Tuscan columns is a rather peculiar touch for the era. The house may in fact be older than its 1830’s or 1840’s fancy dress; I don’t know how to explain the fluting.
Both of these survivors are located only a short distance from the original eastern shoreline of the East River, with Midtown Manhattan on the other side. In the nineteenth century this waterfront was an important site for shipbuilding and its related trades.
Chris Quinn can’t even get a pothole fixed
she’s busy (Quinn sharing with the Police Chief and the Mayor)
Over the past several months I’ve written repeatedly about my frustration and disgust with Chistine Quinn’s attack on our First Amendment rights in her role as City Council Speaker.
She remains completely tone-deaf on the issue, positioning herself somewhere within the cold heart of the NYPD/Republican establishment.
But I’m not a single-issue agitator, and if Tip O’Neil was right when he said “all politics is local“, Quinn’s office should be very worried.
During this same period and starting well before, as one of her local district’s constituents I have been trying to get her office’s attention on the kind of ordinary small-scale problem neighborhood representatives handle all the time – and resolve.
In response to my inquiry about the construction of an invasive animated commercial advertising sign on a public sidewalk next to our home I was eventually told by Quinn’s office that the City authorities had determined that the offending business had no permit for it and could not have been granted a permit had they applied for one because it threatened public safety. The installation would have to be removed within 30 days.
That was March 2, over five months ago, and it’s now eight months since I first made inquiries.
I have been following up with my Council Member’s office ever since to see why nothing has been done. Each time I’ve had to call, and I’ve been told the assistant forgot about it once again but would look into it right away. That has been repeated perhaps eight times.
On July 9 I learned directly from the Department of Buildings that the violation associated with the complaint number I had been given in December had somehow mysteriously disappeared months before. When I asked Quinn’s office if they could get some explanation I was told the person to whom I had been talking over all these months was in a meeting but would call me later that day. On the day after someone else called and said that my file was second from the very top of the first assistant’s priorities and I would hear back from her that very day.
I’ve not been called, and of course the offending installation (a spot-lighted giant revolving cupcake on top of a sidewalk canopy built too close to a hydrant) hasn’t been removed.
For all his transgressions, and they were many, at least New Yorkers can remember Al D’Amato as someone who could get a pothole filled – “Senator Pothole”. What are we going to call Christine Quinn?
[image by Julia Gaines from Newsday]
Mayor’s office withdraws proposed NYC photo ban
crowd before an animated Norm Siegel at July 27 First Amendment rally
The Mayor’s office has backed off from its outrageous set of proposed rules for people using photography anywhere in New York City. It’s a great victory for a free people alert to the threat of arbitrary government and willing to oppose it, but I’d advise against relaxing any guards.
They’ll be back. City officials said they would redraft the rules
In the end any proposed regulation absolutely must be held to a standard that freely permits photography anywhere in the city so long as people are not interfering with anyone else. Beka Economopoulos, the co-founder of Picture New York said it best:
I already have a permit for my camera; it’s called the First Amendment
Corporations and governmental units of every size have their own surveillance cameras trained on me willy-nilly virtually everywhere I go in this city and at all times of the day and night. I don’t recall their ever applying to me for a permit. I should not have to consult their directives or ask their permission to flip a shutter when I wish to do so myself.
Duke Riley: news from the [water] front
under arrest
securing the acorn
This story had legs from the start, sea legs. Barry and I were watching it on line as it grew all day yesterday, and apparently it’s still going.
I would say that this late and abbreviated post were redundant except that I want to broadcast the respect for Duke Riley that we both share, and also to refer to our early immersion in the larger story of his remarkable art, including a wide-eyed visit to the first solo show at Magnan Projects in January last year. Then there was also the excitement of being able to share my own personal connection to and love for Rhode Island, the School of Design, Newport, and the little bicycle shop down my block on the corner of Brook Street, all sites associated with the still-unfolding story of the “Acorn” submersible project.
Don’t miss the slide show or the video on the NYTimes site.
My favorite take on the reaction of our guardians of public safety to the artist’s marine intervention? Libby and Roberta:
The Coast Guard and police didn’t think Riley’s floating bobber was so amusing and the boat was confiscated and he and his accomplices were charged with “marine mischief.” Talk about hammering a fly! Nobody seems to have a sense of humor or whimsy anymore, especially when it comes to imaginative art outside the normal channels. Now that’s a crime.
[images by Damon Winter from NYTimes slide show]
eruv on 6th Avenue
Last week on the day I took shots of this symbolic fence (the thin [nylon?] wires in the photos) along 6th Avenue just below 23rd Street I couldn’t find anything on line confirming that it represented a currently-valid eruv, or shituf mevo’ot [sharing of the alleyways], but the concept itself fascinates me.
a visit to Brooklyn Museum
Judy Chicago The Dinner Party 19741979 ceramic, porcelain and textiles [installation view]
Nayland Blake Untitled 2002 charcoal on paper [installation view]
Florine Stettheimer Heat 1919 [installation view]
[detail]
Ree Morton Regional Work #2 1976 oil on wood with Celastic [installation view]
Jane E. Bartlett Sarah Cowell (later Sarah Cowell Lemoyne) 1877 oil on canvas
Thomas A. Edison Inc., William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, producer Buffalo Dance 1894 video from original 35mm silent B&W film [still from installation]
Raphaelle Peale Still Life with Cake 1822 oil on panel [installation view]
Barry and I really did have a terrific time at Brooklyn Museum yesterday, and we’ve decided to visit its permanent and temporary exhibits much more frequently than we have in the past. It’s an easy subway run from Chelsea (or most anywhere else in Manhattan at least) and the installations are really smart. I was very impressed by the conception and execution of “American Identities” a long-term exhibition in the Luce Center of American Art which occupies much of the fifth floor. We didn’t have time to get into the so-called “visible storage” galleries of the Center, but I’m going to be heading back very soon.
This cultural treasure sits on the edge of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and Prospect Park. It’s both a great museum in Brooklyn and a great museum for Brooklyn. There’s much of Brooklyn in it, although the rare broadcast of that fact is pretty subtle and a very soft sell: Because I was looking for it, because I love my fabulous neighbor borough (and erstwhile great independent city), and because and I know much about its history and its culture, I think I may have been more aware of Brooklyn references than most visitors would be, including natives of burg themselves.
The crowds are smaller than those in the large Manhattan museums, but they just might be a little more enthusiastic, and it’s a delight for me to see their delight. The collection isn’t the least bit provincial, but somehow it seems like a museum you can warm up to. I have.
I’ve uploaded images of just a few things that excited me yesterday. Some of them made it partly because of information provided by documentation on the museum walls I can’t include here, but it’s clearly a very odd company, spontaneously assembled on the spot. Except for the first work, they were all part of “American Identities”, a collection of hundreds of objects from the Museum’s collection of art from all the Americas, including the decorative arts, from the colonial era to the present. Judy Chicago’s heroic and very elegant piece, “The Dinner Party“, is in its [almost?] permanent home on the 4th floor (a separate triangular gallery inside the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art), but all of the other works I show are part of the “American Identities” exhibition one flight up.
It was still being installed when we were there, but I’m really looking forward to visiting the Museum’s upcoming special exhibition, “Global Feminisms Remix“, which opens on Friday right on the other side of the wall from “The Dinner Party”.
Daniel Reich in the Chelsea Hotel
Jeffrey Tranchell Gold Bar 2007 enamel on wood 3.25″ x 32″ [installation view]
Mike Smith untitled 2007 latex, ink and enamel on canvas 24″ x 18″ [installation view]
Mike Smith untitled 2007 latex, ink and enamel on canvas 20″ x 16″ [installation view]
I wanted to do this post over a month ago, as soon as I left “Darjeeling“, the enigmatic title of only the latest informal show installed by the Daniel Reich Gallery in one of the rooms of the Chelsea Hotel. At first I guess a lot of other things got in the way, and when the exhibition with the enigmatic title, shared by the artists Mike Smith and Jeffrey Tranchell, eventually closed writing about it seemed less, what, useful? Well, I haven’t been able to forget it. I continually see that room and its quirky installation in my head, regretting not sharing it here and half promising myself to do a belated entry.
So this is it, but for my tardiness I now feel I can’t leave without going into a bit of history:
Barry and I have been fans of the wonderfully unconventional Daniel Reich and his aesthetic choices from the beginning of his own gallery visibility, when (well before his first foray west of 10th Avenue) he was running a space in his micro-apartment on the ground floor of a building on West 21st Street. Before that we knew him as an assistant in Pat Hearn’s gallery and later the director. Earlier still we had met him when he was one of a number of young earnests attracted to the eccentric court sheltered by Bill Bartman‘s Art Resources Transfer [A.R.T.] gallery, publishing and bookstore space on West 22nd Street.
I’d like to imagine that it’s partly because of Daniel’s own career narrative that these two artists were given the opportunity of mounting this interesting small show.
We like his own shows and we like the Chelsea Hotel, our neighbor. I’ve always regretted that this magnificent building with a legendary, even mythical past, wasn’t the full-time venue for more galleries, but then it is fundamentally a residential pile, and I was always pretty fond of the commercial occupancies which did manage to get leases there, like a tackle shop, a guitar store, a tattoo parlor, a tiny tailor shop, an acupuncture salon. The hotel is under new management today, and even these interesting tenants are now going or already gone from the scene, probably to be replaced with one or more national chains to which none of its present residents or neighbors will ever be able to warm up.
I hope this isn’t one of the Chelsea Hotel’s last adventurous visual arts events, but it and Daniel Reich are certain to remain part of the legend.